Introduction

SUNDASIA is exploring how prehistoric tropical communities adapted to cycles of coastal inundation over the last 60,000 years in northern Vietnam, and how these data can help inform models and responses to modern climate-induced rising seas in this region.

SUNDASIA is based at Queen’s University Belfast. Principal collaborating institutions in the UK are: Bournemouth University, University of Cambridge, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and Queen Mary University of London; and in Vietnam: the Vietnam Institute of Geosciences and Mineral Resources, Tràng An Management Board, Ninh Binh Provincial People’s Committee, the Xuan Truong Enterprise, and the Vietnam Institute of Archaeology.

Updates:

• Field season (9th November – 6th December 2018)

• 23rd October 2018 – Drs Parm and Katharina von Oheimb (The Natural History Museum, London) visited QUB at the invitation of Ioanna Bachtsevanidou Strantzali. Their presentation today was entitled: Community assembly and convergent evolution of land snails (Cyclophorus spp.) on Vietnam’s limestone karsts.

• 15th October 2018 – Congratulations to Rachael Holmes for being awarded: Best Undergraduate Year 2017-18, Faculty of Science & Technology, Bournemouth University.

• 10-14th October 2018 – Thorsten Kahlert presented at the International Symposium for the Conservation, Research and Sustainable Development of Pre-Historic Heritage, Beijing on: The use of immersive visual technology in the promotion and conservation of prehistoric encultured landscapes: A case study from the Trang An World Heritage property, Ninh Binh, Vietnam (abstract).

• 5th July 2018 – Welcome to Ciaran Kelly, who joins the SUNDASIA project on a 2-month summer work-placement to assist Thorsten Kahlert with GIS and archiving.

• 28th June 2018 – Congratulations to all of the great undergraduate students from QUB who have been working on the SUNDASIA Project during the last year. Graduation today!

• 28th June 2018 – Emilie Green receives the Kerr Meritorious Performance Prize, and as joint winner, the Kerr Final Year Dissertation Prize (Archaeology & Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast) for her undergraduate dissertation entitled: The Utilisation of Archaeometric Methods for the Compositional and Residual Analysis of Dabutian Pottery Fragments from the Ninh Binh Province, Northern Vietnam. Meghan McAllister receives the Basil Wilson Prize for best performance in the 3rd Year.

• 21st June – 5th July 2018 – Nguyen Thi Mai Huong is visiting Queen’s University Belfast to analyse sediment cores with Shawn O’Donnell that they collected in Tràng An during the April 2018 field season.

• 15th June 2018 – Welcome to Evan Hill, who joins the SUNDASIA project in an official capacity on a part-time research assistantship, adding his expertise in carbon off-sets and radiocarbon dating terrestrial land snails to the chronometric component of the project.

• 4-9th June 2018 Vietnam – Chris Stimpson presented at the 18th Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (UISPP), Paris on: Spatial and temporal trends in late Pleistocene hunting behaviour in limestone karsts in Northern Vietnam: evidence from the Tràng An World Heritage Area (abstract).

• 15th May 2018 – Congratulations to Benjamin Utting for being awarded PhD funding from the Evans Fund, Cambridge.

• 10-11th May 2018 – Fiona Coward and Shawn O’Donnell presented at: Bridging the Gap and Crossing Borders: The Transition from Foraging to Farming in Northern Vietnam and Southern China workshop held at the School of Archaeology & Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra. Presentations entitled, respectively:

• SUNDASIA: recent fieldwork, human-environment interaction and prehistoric social networks in the Tràng An region of northern Vietnam